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I should have gotten around to nakedly self-promoting this earlier in the week when it first posted, but I did one of those Salon “conversations” on the subject of race and the Democratic primary, along with Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and The Century Foundation’s Ruy Teixeira , hosted by Salon’s Mark Schone . You can read the transcript and/or listen to the audio here . It’s also available for download through iTunes at the Salon “Conversations” page. Basic summary: It’s obviously impossible to disentangle and therefore measure exactly how much race factored into voting for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama , but surely it mattered some to some voters and perhaps a lot to a subset of those voters. And this was within the Democratic primary, mind you; Obama, I suspect, will have another Philadelphia speech-like moment in the general election he’ll have to manage. --Tom Schaller

Put aside message and money, and one realizes that Barack Obama won this thing because his strategists and field team, led by David Plouffe and aided considerably the Hildebrand-Tewes consulting team and a dose of targeting genius from Strategic Telemetry’s Ken Strasma , created a strategy designed to maximize the pledged delegates won based on Obama’s support in each state. The best analytical distillation I have seen of this—and, particularly, of how Obama crushed Hillary Clinton in the caucus states while using the DNC’s proportionality rules to minimize his delegate losses in primary states he lost while maximizing them in the primary states he won—is a piece published yesterday called "How Obama Did It" by somebody named Justin Sizemore , writing for University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato’s “Crystal Ball ‘08” site. It’s a great read--and it has super tables too, for the numbers geeks, like me, who dig that sort of thang. --Tom Schaller

I've long been an advocate of candidates running together as a presidential and vice presidential slate through the primaries, something only I and Chuck Todd in this town seem to think makes sense. (I wrote a piece in 2005 advocating this strategy. He did too but the link is broken.) Anyway, now that Barack Obama has won the nomination, my initial reflex is that he ought to choose quickly—not rashly, of course, just quickly—and build a shadow cabinet of sort outward from there. Today the Obama campaign announced that Caroline Kennedy will join former Clinton Administration aide Eric Holder and Democratic strategist Jim Jordan Johns on the vice presidential search committee. However, I would add one very important qualifier: If Obama is leaning toward picking Hillary Clinton , he ought to wait as long as possible until Denver, whereas if, as I suspect, he's not going to pick her he ought to move much quicker . Here's my water-tight, don't-even-try-arguing-with-me logic: If he is...

A few television commentators remarked last night on the fact that Barack Obama didn't talk much about himself in his St. Paul speech. Oddly, last night was one moment when he would have been given wide berth for self-absorption on the level of, say, what Hillary Clinton delivered. (Go read friend-of-the- Prospect Mike Tomasky's piece in the Guardian today for more on that.) However, Obama did drop two names into his speech last night that, amid all the discussion of his comments about Hillary, were largely overlooked: Bill Clinton . Obama slipped in a nice line during a series of remarks about the meaning of real change by crediting the former president for showing how "fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was President." I predict that, long after the dust settles, if Obama becomes president he and Bill Clinton will end up being very chummy; Clinton, after all, always liked being where the action is. David Plouffe . It was...

Say what you want about Team Obama’s rough couple of months since the Ohio and Texas primaries, but with the nomination now secure they are signaling very clearly that they intend to fight harder and smarter than John Kerry did four years ago. First, you have Obama going straight into the teeth of his Republican opponents last night by giving his speech in St. Paul, where the Republican National Convention will be held this September. And then, second, he turns and heads to western Virginia to meet tomorrow with those very same white voters from Appalachia who voted for Hillary Clinton and perhaps remain wary of Obama. (For more about Obama's visit, I recommend blogger Patrick Ottenhoff , who runs one of my favorite sites, The Electoral Map ; he has a great post about what western Virginia looks like relative to the rest of the state.) As the general election stage begins, the early signal from Obama is that he is not going to be the conflict-avoidant candidate we saw four years ago--...